Musings of a Snickerdoodle

Having read the unabridged Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas I was interested to see that there was an abridged version and was curious to see how the abridged version would compare to the original.   It was a nice attempt, but it definitely isn't even half as good.   For one thing, it seemed choppy at parts, for instance, at one point, the Nazi party is a small minority party in the government and then all of a sudden Hitler is in power. As far as I can recollect, It didn't really talk about the growth of the Nazis like the other one did.   I understand that in order for it to be 'abridged' lots of things would have to be 'cut', but I thought that it should have had a little bit more of the background of what was going on politically in Germany just for clarities sake.   And another example of its 'choppiness' was where Bonhoeffer declares that he won't go to the 'Fano' conference if a particular 'Reich-church' leader went too, and then w...

I've started a shadow blog that sounds more like a 'theological' blog than a 'cooking blog'.  I'll still keep this one up as my 'main' blog, but I do want to recommend a Christian novel that just came out, Polycarp: A destroyer of our gods - by Rick Lambert: You can read my review on my other blog,  HERE  

The Evangelism Study Bible is intended to help with Evangelism.   It has a lot of footnotes, commenting on the relevance of many verses to evangelism.   It also contains various charts explaining/expounding on certain topics, like the fruit of the spirit, the whole armor of God…etc.   There are many 'commentary' boxes, discussing various evangelism related topics, that are inserted throughout the Bible as well.   One in particular I appreciated dealt with the question, "Do You Have to Know the Date You Were Saved?", and it deals with the source of our assurance of our salvation being Christ, " …when Scripture speaks of salvation, it goes back to a fact, not a date.   If you are trusting in Christ alone, you are saved, regardless of when the divine transaction took place…..The one who saved us gives us security, not the 'when' of our salvation." I also appreciate that many of the footnotes remind us that, though we are privileged to serve God by gi...

The first time I remember hearing about the HCSB translation was in John Macarthur's book: ' SLAVE: The hidden truth about your identity in Christ', in which this translation is used because it translates 'doulos' literally as 'slave' rather than the less accurate translation of 'servant' or 'bondservant'.   That made me curious to take a better look at the translation.   This translation uses "Optimal Equivalence" as the translation method which they consider to be a careful cross between formal equivalence an dynamic/functional equivalence.   Also, the translators do not give in to gender neutrality, as they mention in their 'introduction':   "…the translators have not changed 'him' to 'you' or to 'them,'   neither have they avoided other masculine words such as 'father' or 'son' by translating them in generic terms…"   There were some specific things that I looke...